"To Make a Novel": The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan's Atonement

Abstract

Much of critical response to Ian McEwan's novel Atonement has focused on metafictional elements of work's narrative structure, as well as Briony Tallis's revelation in final pages that she in fact authored text. Critics have asked whether novel earns this epilogue or whether it is an abrupt rendering of a straightforward realist narrative into what David Lodge has called a postmodernist metafiction (87). Brian Finney counters readers who find that ending inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality (69) by asserting that text's narrative structure actually supports Briony's final admission from first page. He argues, read this novel as a work of that is from beginning to end concerned with of fiction (69). Of Briony's engagement with he states: She attempts to use to errors that caused her to commit. But chasm that separates world of living from that of fictional invention ensures that at best her fictional reparation will act as an attempt at atoning for a past that she cannot reverse. Atonement, then, is concerned with dangers of entering a fictional world and compensations and limitations which that world can offer its readers and writers. (69) Briony's attempts to make amends for her crime through will inevitably fail; in fact, this seems to be point. Although atonement is only possible through act of writing, result of that writing remains limited by restrictions of fiction. To put it simply, cannot absolve or undo transgressions that have taken place in real world. Although I agree with Finney's observations about these implications of and their application within Atonement, his reading does not account for fact that Briony is herself a fictional construct. reality that she renders as is not a material reality; it exists only within pages of novel. McEwan's move to reveal Briony as author makes transparent another narrative aspect that novel explores: relationship of to text. For if Atonement is a novel concerned with making of fiction, it is also a novel concerned with reading of as well as reading of experience. Briony's crime has been widely read as one of literary imagination, but it is also one of poor reading comprehension. Nevertheless, adult Briony has learned value of reading, and she constructs a narrative that continually reminds of this crucial role. In this sense, McEwan positions Atonement against earlier narrative models that were also concerned with author-reader relationship, specifically 18th-century novel and modernist novel. In his critique of reader's role, McEwan presents an implicit argument about ethical responsibility for readers of contemporary fiction. Readers hold final power of interpretation, judgment, and atonement; to meet these aims, they must maintain a stance toward text that involves both critical assessment and empathetic identification. As we will see, both tasks prove necessary for readers of Atonement. By emphasizing reader's role in this novel, and, in particular, reader's position to grant or withhold atonement that Briony seeks, my discussion speaks to broader debates within response criticism over whether (and how) meaning can be fixed within a text. Since ascent of deconstructionist criticism asserting that all texts are inherently relative and decentered--a notion embodied in Roland Barthes's radical claim that The birth of must come at death of Author (150)--reader response critics have had to reconsider certain foundational aspects of their theory. Who is the reader of a text in light of postmodern and poststructuralist theory? Do signs embedded within a text point toward a correct reading, or do individual readers determine anew their own authoritative meaning? …